I don't think this is where you were going with your comment, but I'll mention this just because you're somewhat adjacent to a routine mistake in business:
Uber is a people delivery company, but they've had a lot of bright engineers working for them on their infrastructure and software over the years, and that work has rippled out through the industry.
Amazon (in VMWare's words) is "a company that sells books", and their leadership couldn't accept they were losing to them ("I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.").
The thing that stood out for me about Meituan was that their power bank rental gizmos were everywhere in China, and people would rather rent a power bank than own and carry one around because of how convenient it is.
I don't think this is where you were going with your comment, but I'll mention this just because you're somewhat adjacent to a routine mistake in business:
Uber is a people delivery company, but they've had a lot of bright engineers working for them on their infrastructure and software over the years, and that work has rippled out through the industry.
Amazon (in VMWare's words) is "a company that sells books", and their leadership couldn't accept they were losing to them ("I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.").
And Google is the ad factory.
Doubleclick buying google's brand was the smartest business move ever.
consider this as stolen as all the gemini training data
It's mostly a conglomerate nowadays (e.g the list of subsidiaries in Wikipedia is huge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meituan).
In the same way than Amazon spin-up AWS, they are quite leveraging their tech experience.
When do we get our first DoorDash-trained model? </sarc>
The thing that stood out for me about Meituan was that their power bank rental gizmos were everywhere in China, and people would rather rent a power bank than own and carry one around because of how convenient it is.
People buy millions of powerbanks in China.
And the group owning Lidl built STACKIT.